One thing that really surprised me was the rebuying of books. I’ve gotten lazy. I search for a Nook book, I click the purchase link, I’m told I own it.

However, if I have forgotten I own it, and its been reissued under another ISBN – I’m out of luck.

I’ve done this twice now, and had to spend a not insignificant time working with four different customer service chat people to get the books removed and refunded.

What’s so hard about keeping track of your books?

Maybe I’m just lazy. No, I know I am. I pick up books like others buy candy bars or Pokemon cards. I simply can’t remember every single book I’ve bought. And we’ve all become dependent on the machines in our lives to track these things.

Yes, if it’s the same ISBN, bn.com is smart enough to remind me that I own it. Amazon does something similar with their item numbers; I can see when I’ve bought a book or an item before; that notification either reminds me to look for it, or gives me confidence that I am reordering the correct item.

Amazon and bn.com haven’t quite managed similars yet, though. If I buy a 2 pack of fridge light bulbs and later go searching for a single pack, I won’t be pointed by Amazon to the similar if different item. Amazon could solve this (as could bn.com) with some underlying architectural and search changes.

What’s the key to preventing duplication?

Aliasing and item matching.

Amazon does this to some degree; if you look for a book, you will find it, depending on when it was added to their system, displayed in multiple formats, available and linked on the product page. Hardcover, paperback, library binding, Audible book, unknown binding, previous editions, CD audio book, Kindle edition. They don’t quite yet remind you that you already own this item in [an alternative format], but they could.

Barnes and Noble could do this. Alias the ISBN numbers. If someone tries to purchase ISBN-13: 978-0-9836472-1-8, it could remind them that they already own ISBN-10: 0983647208 (not a terrific example, as one is a paperback and the other is the ebook edition). But maybe they want the paperback! So it reminds them, but doesn’t stop them from buying the book.

But what if that book gets turned into a movie? And the book changes publishers, and a larger edition is put out with illustrations, and a new cover picturing the stars of the movie? It may look like a different book, but it’s essentially the same. You click “buy” and now you own two editions of the item in ebook format.

If the ISBN numbers were linked, bn.com could look at your history and tell you something along the lines of “Hey, you have this edition of the book, purchased in January of last year. Are you sure you want another edition of it?”

Sure, buying it again is an option, and a boon for the industry (they’ve already got me rebuying all the books I got at the new and used bookstores of my youth). But it’s really annoying.

Armed with my kid-friendly Nook library, I’ve loaded the Nook app on my iPhone again, so I can read my own books.

The screen may be small, but it’s somewhat readable until my vision goes. And it’s searchable, much like the Nook app.

What’s the deal with NOOK for the web?

What drives me crazy about NOOK for the web is that it’s not searchable. The books show up, in “recent” order (by date of purchase, newest to oldest), 12 to a page. With 300+ books in my library, it’s quite a number of pages.

So to find a book, I have to play “guess”. If I know the book, what page is it likely to be on in recent order? Okay, resort by title name, 60 entries to the page. Wait for it to refresh. Hit Ctrl + F and search on the title. Nope. Page 2, repeat. Page 3, repeat. Or resort by author name.

Or scroll scroll scroll, looking for something to read.

It’s not that fun.

What about the great archiving effort I went through the other day? Every time I clicked the Archive link online, I had to wait for the page to redraw itself. And sometimes it would reset to 12 items per page in recent order. Difficult and annoying.

How can they fix NOOK for the web?

We have to sign in to view our library, so I’d start by suggesting they allow users to set preferences. I prefer 60 items per page; sorting by author (last) name. Allow me to set those preferences, and keep them.

Have “recent” mean more than what you just purchased. Alternatively, rename it “sort by newest purchase” and add “recently read” as an option, too.

Sorting by author name is okay in a web page that has precious little ability to do anything. There’s no option to sort by first name, or to turn up a secondary or tertiary author. Nor is there a reverse sort (Z-A). Those are simple niceties to add; the information is there, after all.

Honestly, searching is the thing I miss the most when moving from Nook or Nook app to the web.

Getting around the lack of search on NOOK for web. 

Another broken item is using the web page to search the Nook available books. If a user searches the bn.com web site for a specific Nook book, they can find it. Yay. But it never tells the user that they already own it (assume the user is logged in). It’s not until they click the purchase link are they told that they own it.

Is it hard to start reading it right away? Amazon (sometimes) manages it.

The Nook stuff is just a bolt-on.

The lack of integration, after all this time, is really starting to annoy me. I bought a first generation Nook and books with the express purpose of supporting an alternative publishing garden to Amazon and iTunes.

If Nook wants to move into a more flexible sphere instead of simply raking in money for renting text books, the integration needs to be much tighter with the web page. The underlying architecture of the two systems (NOOK for the web and bn.com) have to work with each other, and the users need to have more control over their environment.

Make Library management a priority.

In addition to user preference options and searchability, the library management is pretty limited. You can archive something (hide it from your library ecosystem temporarily), you can delete items (I thought it was sci fi, not sci fi soft core porn), and you and unarchive items.

And you can do it one item at a time. Only.

Add in a check box option next to each book. Allow the books to be selected, and have an action apply to all of those books, such as archive and unarchive.

Adding check boxes and bulk actions should not be a huge change, and it allows us people who were dumb enough to buy books to “share” and not share within the family a lot less hassle in setting up person-specific friendly libraries.

I have 302 books in my Nook Library.

For better or for worse, I am wedded to the Nook architecture, unless I decide to trot down the path so many others have of un-DRMing their books and putting them on any device they so please.

But what drives me nuts is that with all the competition out there, there is no incentive for them to improve their system.

Trying to read online or on a phone.

If you’re reading a book online in your web browser (NOOK for Web), you get bonked out every few hours. You aren’t told that you’re logged out – you just can’t read the next chapter. So you’ve got to go to the main page, log in, find your book, and start reading again. If you’re lucky, the system has remembered where you are, and you can pick up at the next chapter.

If you’re unlucky, it took you three or four tries to get in because the Nook system insists you only have a sample and it’s time to pony up to buy the book. So you play along, click “buy” and it says you already own it. You can’t read it, because web page A says you don’t own it, and you can’t open it because web page B sends you to web page A.

No worries, open it on your phone app! Oh, but your phone is out of memory. And it’s a large technical book, so your phone app screen isn’t very useful. Grab an iPad! ($400 later …) and set it up with wireless or a cell service … urgh.

And I can’t read my three Calvin and Hobbes books I’ve bought using this format of viewing.

Trying to read on a Nook.

I’ve only got the smallest, cheapest Nook (why did I ever give up the one with free cellular download!) and it does not have a lot of memory. No worries, just download books when I’m at a friendly wifi link. If I remember. If I have my charger. If the kids don’t want to read it instead of me.

I could remedy this if I bought a second Nook, I guess.

And I can’t read my three Calvin and Hobbes books I’ve bought using this format of viewing.

Trying to find a book.

I have 302 books. I can’t group them. I can reorganize them, slightly, in alpha order. Sometimes my Nook/Nook App remembers what I was reading last. But I find it difficult to page through books (302) in random order to find something I may or may not have bought or may or may not have archived.

And if I’ve been logged out while reading online, it’s another pain and a half.

Am I the only person on the planet with this many books? Did Nook designers (hardware and software) expect this was just a novelty?

I can’t read my three Calvin and Hobbes books I’ve bought using these formats of viewing.

I have access to a Windows computer. An Apple computer. I have access to an iPad, iPad Mini, and an iPhone. (I have several patient friends who let me experiment on their hardware.)

I can’t read my three Calvin and Hobbes books because I don’t own a Nook HD. Argh. I don’t want one, I’ve maintained that forever. I like my simple little Nook. I can deign to read on the computer. I want to read my Calvin books. Are they that hard to convert to read on the web?

It’s increasingly difficult to share my books with the kids.

You’d think I would have prevented my own stupidity. But, alas, no. I bought my books and the kids books on the same account. I can’t just throw a Nook at them and let them read a book; I have to pre-prep it by archiving all my books, syncing it, turning off wifi, then unarchiving my books online.

I just want a divorce! Divorce my kid books from my adult books. Dumb of me to not keep them separate at the outset. Makes me wonder if divorce decrees now spell out “who gets the apps and digital video library”.

However, Netflix has figured it out, with different login profiles. Each profile has things appropriate or set up as needed. Even if I had to add books to the kid login myself in my Nook account, I’d do it! I just “culled” my books online to show only the kid books, and left 5 “adult” books they might find interesting.

Total count of books to sync with the kids? 149. 144 if you don’t count the 5 adult books I left for them.

Come on Nook, make it happen. Alternatively, someone buy Nook and fix it!